Jack Straw Reading Series: Merna Ann Hecht, Kevin Craft, Jennifer Munro, & Wendy Call May 15, 2008

Poet and Jack Straw Writers Program curator Judith Roche hosts three readings at Jack Straw Productions in May that feature new work by the 2008 Jack Straw Writers. This is the 1st of the three events. Admission to each reading is a $5 suggested donation, and comes with a gift of the 2008 Jack Straw Writers Anthology. Look out for the podcast preview of the series on May 1 at http://www.jackstraw.org/blog.

Merna Ann Hecht is a storyteller, poet, and educator. Her years of work in specialized settings include the Hutchinson Cancer Research Center School, BRIDGES: A Center for Grieving Children, detention centers and facilities for homeless youth. She also teaches in the Writers in the Schools Program. Hecht is a recipient of the National Storytelling Network 2008 Brimstone Award for Applied Storytelling. Her writing has appeared in Kaleidoscope, Out of Line, Talking Points: Journal of Whole Language, The National Storytelling Journal, Standing: An Anthology of Women Poets, The Storyteller's Classroom, Chosen Tales, and other books and journals.

Kevin Craft holds a BA in English and French from the University of Maryland and an MFA in English from the University of Washington (UW). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Gulf Coast, AGNI, Verse, Antioch Review, Pontoon, Crab Creek Review, Poetry Northwest, and other reviews and journals. His book, Solar Prominence, won the Samuel & Rhea Gorsline Prize in 2004. Craft was featured in the Mississippi Review Prize Poems of the Year in 2000 and 2001, was a Bread Loaf Scholar in 1996, and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), Camargo Foundation (France), and Washington Arts Commission/Artist Trust. He teaches at Everett Community College and at the UW's Rome Center in Italy.

Jennifer D. Munro was born and raised in Hawaii as a fourth-generation islander, and now lives in Seattle. She has been published in the journals North American Review, Boulevard, Massachusetts Review, and Zyzzyva and the anthologies The Best of Best American Erotica edited by Susie Bright, The Bigger the Better, the Tighter the Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty, Body Image, and Other Hazards of Being Female, and Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica (Volumes 3, 6, 7). Her first collection of fiction, The Erotica Writer's Husband, has just been published by en theos press. Munro is currently at work on a nonfiction book about miscarriage and motorcycling, entitled Not Suitable for Children.

Wendy Call is writer-in-residence at Richard Hugo House and co-editor of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide (Plume/Penguin, 2007). Excerpts from her nonfiction book-in-progress, No Word for Welcome, have won awards from 4Culture, Artist Trust, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Seattle City Artist Program. Call's writing has appeared in more than 20 magazines and literary journals in seven countries, often accompanied by her photographs. She has taught creative writing workshops in English and Spanish at universities, community centers, newsrooms, and detention centers.

Official Website: http://www.jackstraw.org